2023 Week 09 Update

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Namaskara from India’s Silicon Valley, Bengaluru! We arrived here at the retirement community my parents live in now earlier this week and this was BB & GG’s first flight and overseas trip in more than three years. It’s also been that long since they have physically seen and spoken to their grandparents. My parents are also super excited to see their grandchildren and both grandparents and grandchildren are having a good time with each other.

Today’s quote is from the Indian Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. It’s a beautiful quote where he asks people to let life lightly dance on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf. I believe what Tagore was trying to convey was just like a dewdrop sits on the tip of a leaf in the morning, light and delicately, one should also let their lives live on the edges, lightly and able to change at a moment’s notice.

Since we just ended February, let me share my monthly stats with you. This month, I read less than I did last month – I read 10 books this month, mostly fiction, with a couple of non-fiction thrown in. I don’t think I will be able to reach much this month, because of my India trip, but I will do my best.

As for my steps and walking, this month I walked more than 200 km and am now somewhere between Wardha and Jalna in my home state of Maharashtra. I am about less than 600 km from my home in Mumbai and from there, to get to Bengaluru where my parents are currently living is another 1600 km.

That’s all this week. Next week, maybe there will some mention of the time we had in Bengaluru. Watch this space!

In My Hands Today…

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Anu: The Nomad Years – Shabnam Vasisht

When Anu married a Hindu of the highest caste, she entered a world far removed from her Christian roots.

This, the second part of Anu’s biography, covers her marriage years. She followed her army husband across the length and breadth of a newly-independent India.

Anu’s adventures took her from the bustling capital city of Delhi to the scorpion -infested Ahmednagar; from the mosquito-ridden Patna to the lotus lakes of Kashmir; and from the campsite of Udhampur to the hills of the Western Ghats.

Along the way, she bore three children and wrestled with a marriage that swung from one extreme to another. Eventually, Anu made a decision that would dramatically change her life again. But that’s another story …

50 Must-Read Books

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I easily read one book a week, more if I am caught up in the book. A couple of weeks back, I was thinking back to the thousands of books I must have read in my lifetime and wondered if these are books one must read in their lifetime. So I decided to compile a list and in this list are some favourites, some that I have read, and some I have on my to-read list. How many of these have you read?

Of course, each person’s must-read books will be different depending on their taste, and what someone may consider a must-read may have not made it to this list. This list of 50 books in alphabetical order is not an exhaustive one by any stretch, so if there is a book I have missed that needs to be included, let me know and I will add it for others to discover new books too.

Source
  1. 1984 by George Orwell
  2. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  4. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  5. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
  6. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  7. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
  8. Charlotte’s Web by E. B White
  9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  10. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  11. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  12. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  13. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
  14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  15. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
  16. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  17. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  18. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  19. Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan
  20. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
  21. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
  22. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  24. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  25. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
  26. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
  27. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
  28. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  29. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  30. The Color Purple: A Novel by Alice Walker
  31. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  32. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
  33. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
  34. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
  35. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  36. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
  37. The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan
  38. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
  39. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  40. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
  41. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  42. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
  43. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
  44. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  45. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
  46. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  47. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  48. Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh
  49. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  50. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Did your favourite books make the list?

In My Hands Today…

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The Art of Travel – Alain de Botton

Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow.

Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a wise and utterly original book. Don’t leave home without it.